The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Developer Diary #9: UGAGS

We’ve chatted quite a bit about the design and look of New School Blues. But what about the code needed to make it run? Every developed game needs an engine, a structure that the game gets its logic from . Think of it like a car, even with tires and a slick body it won’t run without something telling it what to do. Let’s let YoyoBolo programmer Amir get into more detail:

Game engine made by yours truly…

“New School Blues is being developed using an engine called UGAGS. What is UGAGS you ask? Well it stands for Untold Graphic Adventure Game System, and it does pretty much as advertised; especially for a tool that’s still in it’s early stages of development.

It makes laying out navigation meshes and waypoints in the room a relative breeze, which having experience doing this in code, can be a pain if you’re doing so without any visual guidance; which UGAGS offers.

Can you imagine how long it would take to place all these clickable objects purely in code without a visual tool like UGAGS?

My current tasks are trying to implement the game logic into each of the rooms. That basically means I’m trying to make the game play like a game by adding events and interactive points where they are needed. It’s a fun process but can get a bit overwhelming when you’re trying to juggle all the variables up in your head; I usually have scattered sheets around with garbled lists of variables that I may need. UGAGS in this area can get a little tricky but given it’s stage in development I don’t really hold anything against the little guy.”

More on UGAGS and programming on NSB to follow. For now, thanks for reading!